AcrosticSleuth is a tool that can uncover acrostics in multilingual corpora by treating this problem as text classification in the context of extreme class imbalance. An acrostic is a text or a poem that encodes a message in the first letters of every word, sentence, or a paragraph. Such messages have been used by writers across centuries as signatures or to avoid censorship. AcrosticSleuth reveals several acrostics for the first time ever, including one in the opening paragraphs of Thomas Hobbes’ famous philosophical treatise The Elements of Law.

GitHub Repo: github.com/acrostics/acrostic-sleuth

Paper (NAACL): aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.414/